Feb. 27, 2013 — Older people who have low expectations for a satisfying future may be more likely to live longer, healthier lives than those who see brighter days ahead, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.

"Our findings revealed that being overly optimistic in predicting a better future was associated with a greater risk of disability and death within the following decade," said lead author Frieder R. Lang, PhD, of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany. "Pessimism about the future may encourage people to live more carefully, taking health and safety precautions." The study was published online in the journal Psychology and Aging.

When we debate health care policy, we seem to jump right to the issue of who should pay the bills, blowing past what should be the first question: Why exactly are the bills so high?What are the reasons, good or bad, that cancer means a half-million or million-dollar tab? Why should a trip to the emergency room for chest pains that turn out to be indigestion bring a bill that can exceed the cost of a semester of college? What makes a single dose of even the most wonderful wonder drug cost thousands of dollars? Why does simple lab work done during a few days in a hospital cost more than a car? And what is so different about the medical ecosystem that causes technology advances to drive bills up instead of down?

For those without the time or inclination to plough through a 26,000-word article, here's a tl;dr summary from The Washington Post..

Much of Brill’s piece focuses on the absurdly high prices that hospitals and doctors charge for the most mundane items. A single Tylenol tablet can cost $1.50 when “you can buy 100 of them on Amazon for $1.49 even without a hospital’s purchasing power.” One patient gets charged $6 for a marker used to mark his body before surgery. Another is billed $77 for each of four boxes of gauze used. One hospital, according to Brill’s math, bills $1,200 per hour for one nurse’s services.

The game allows the player to play both sides of a riot where, as Menchiari explains it, "there is no such thing as victory or defeat." Still in development, Menchiari and his team plan to travel to Italy, Greece, and Egypt to document live riots where, to avoid bias, only footage and dialogue captured by them will be used in-game.